


A Runic Wayfarer

by Aimz_ICR



Category: League of Legends
Genre: History, Old Lore, Other, Worldbuilding, taric in the rune wars
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:27:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 5,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24196687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aimz_ICR/pseuds/Aimz_ICR
Summary: A series of drabbles building the history of original-lore Taric. A stranger in a strange land, ageless, immortal, and trying to find his place.Originally posted on tumblr, saved here for posterity.
Kudos: 1





	1. The Fall

The battlefield is rife with shouts and the clang of weapons, the weeping and wailing of dying men, the rough croaks of scavenging birds, the sound of bells and drums to urge combatants onward and forward. Onward to glory, the songs cry. But there is no glory here. Just rough, merciless shoving, impaling, gutting, slicing, holding ground and losing it. Piss and sweat and entrails and shit and blood. So much blood.

There is a light. And an explosion. Historians will record a falling star landed on the battlefield in a spear of light and a great boom that cracked the earth.

There is a breath in the battle as a figure rises to his feet, shaking off shards of superheated earth and sand. There is a haze of dust around him, slowly settling. He pants. He rolls his shoulders. 

He looks down at the bodies strewn around him. At the soldiers still clinging to life. At the ones bleeding out of their armour. At the ones standing with weapons in hand.

Around him, they form a circle. Men in bronze, and men in iron, and men in leather, and men in chain. There are broken banners and symbols he does not recognise. He stares. He stares, as bewildered as the armies around him.

They stare back. They stare at this stranger among them.

The ground is sturdy beneath his feet. The crater from his landing seems like a cradle. But the blood and piss and shit is leaking in. Pooling around his feet.

He hears a scream. One of the soldiers observing him gargles out his life's breath in a spray of red, an arrow piercing his neck from behind. He drops his spear, claws at the air, gasps fruitlessly, then falls.

At his collapse, the spell is broken. The armies resume their clash, man to man, sword to sword, spear to spear. A man with an axe roars some brutal challenge, and barrels towards a boy who has dropped his sword.

The axe cleaves the boy in half, from shoulder to hip. The stranger watches the boy's eyes wide in terror, hears the boy's feeble bleating as life holds on and death denies him.

The stranger kneels and holds the boy in his arms. The boy is beyond his healing, but he is not beyond The Song. Softly, the strangers sings, in a voice broken and dry, until all the boy's lifeblood is spent and all the stranger holds is some sad, shattered pieces of meat.

There's so much blood. So much.

The sky crackles overhead. He looks up. A bolt like a comet is streaking from west to east, a broiling sphere of purple light. When it touches the ground, men scream, men are sucked inside their own skeletons, men burst asunder in fragments of flesh and steel and gore. There is an answering bolt, east to west, in white, and men die just the same in the other direction.

The blood is seeping into the earth.

The earth pulses.

Everything is dying and he can hear nothing but screams.

So he, too, screams.

And the battlefield cracks open at his Song.


	2. The Sundering

For the second time that day, the battlefield is bathed in white light. The second flash is nowhere near as blinding, but it makes the air taste sharp, like lightning.

The stranger stands with feet braced firm. His hands are clawed and his arms are locked before him, as though he is lifting some massive burden. Sweat beads on his brow. His raiment gleams, bright and vivid, and flickers of something like sparks seem to lance through the crystals set in his shoulders.

The fighting stops once more, at first from confusion, and then from alarm. The earth is shaking. Rumbling. Cracking and heaving like a hatching egg.

The stranger Sings, low and ragged, gasping for each between each syllable. He shouldn't be doing this. He shouldn't be _able_ to do this. But _so much_ blood has been spilled, and the ley lines that criss-cross this battlefield are _so close_ to the surface. His eyes are blurred from tears and his heart is aching from this _utterly_ foreign feeling.

All around him is the chaos of shaking and rumbling and a sheer _**N O I S E**_ like no other.

When his blood cools, he realises he is kneeling. Like a penitent.

There's no-one left alive on the battlefield. No-one but him.

The carrion birds have fled. In the distance are the sound of horns and panicked voices, as armies signal their retreat. What was once a field strewn with bodies is now a massive shattered crater. The soil has blackened, as though from the heat of a massive firestorm, the soil cracked and parched and utterly _barren_. From under the earth, vast glowing crystals have burst forth, pulsing with a light that can only be described as _angry_. And there he sits in the middle of it all.

It's silent. So utterly silent.

He looks down at his hands.

There's _so much_ blood.


	3. The Pieces

At first, he tries to distance himself from the bloody wound he broke into the earth's skin. He makes a camp in some distant part of the woods, claiming a limestone cave and lighting a fire from fallen twigs and broken branches. The first two nights he goes hungry. On the third, he finds a river full of fish, and in desperation and clumsiness he catches more than he should take. He makes himself sick, and spends the day eating grass, like some beast, until his stomach settles. He makes a spear from one of the broken branches. On the fourth day, he eats well, on fish and berries and a strange kind of wild onion. He could stay in this cave forever.

But he hears his father's words, and feels his mother's disapproval. And so he returns.

His heart pounds as he makes the climb. The ley lines still sing their fury to him, and he feels sick and almost dizzy from the hatred frozen in stone. He stands on the rise, looking down into the crater. Red stones. Blackened soil. Jagged forks in the earth like a lightning strike preserved. No birds fly overhead; no insects or animals seek shade in this ruined place.

But he is not the only one here.

On east and west sides of the crater are small camps. The banners on the east are red, and on west they are blue. White flags flutter between them, a sign the stranger seems to know instinctively that this means peace.

He starts to climb down into the crater, knowing he will be seen. Knowing he will be judged.

A vast prism seems to buzz with power as he approaches. Some dead man's dying breath is caught within. The stranger weeps, silently, and reaches out with gauntleted hands to brush against the stone. The facet cuts the stranger, not through steel or flesh, but in spirit. He weeps all the louder, and Sings, breathlessly, begging for forgiveness. It takes all day, for his Song is weak compared to the fury restrained in this place.

Slowly, the redness of the crystal cracks and pales. The earth rumbles. The stone turns to dust as it withdraws into the soil, and a faint wisp lifts itself into nothingness. The stranger watches, exhausted, broken, through tear-blurred eyes, as it disappears into the starlit sky.

There is a shout from the ridge. Men in robes - he cannot tell their colours from the glare of the sunlight - call down to him. Their language is as foreign to him as the sound of a dog barking. But from their tone, they sound as curious as they are angry.

They know who he is. They know he's the one responsible.

The stranger makes the climb towards them, on legs that tremble, his brow covered in a sheen of sweat. The people draw away from him, in fear and disgust. One of them spits, and snarls a word. 

He doesn't know what the word means. But it is harsh and unforgiving and he knows that he deserves it. He keeps walking, returning to his cave to sleep. To eat. To return again with the dawn.

It will take him a hundred years to undo the damage he has wrought in a day.

He faces his penance unflinching.


	4. The Flow

It was finished.

The stranger knelt, breathing heavily. Hands shaking where they hung by his side. All around him stretched a bowl of blackened, salted earth. Cracked and blistered despite all the years' worth of weather that had passed this way. But there was not a single red fury left. They were gone. They had been released.

It was _finished_.

On the ridge, a small crowd had gathered. The curious, the scholarly, the relations of the fallen... he did not know. There was a village half a day away, he had seen it; perhaps they'd come from there. But there were far too many for him. His penance was done, but all those staring eyes still felt like judgement upon him.

The stranger pushed himself to his feet, and made the slow climb out of the crater. Towards the waiting crowd.

He recognised some of them. Men and women had withered like plants in the high sun, and then were seen no more. Children who had grown tall, and now came holding their own sons and daughters. How strange he must be to them. How frightening. His hands tightened in his gauntlets, and he walked. A gauntlet of silence. And stares. 

He walked.

Then someone gave a rusty cry. 

A child threw a handful of petals at his feet.

The cries grew louder, and there was soft applause, ragged at first, and then louder. More flowers fell at his feet.

The stranger blinked, perplexed. Why were they cheering? He was the one who did this. To end it was no cause for celebration. He should be reviled, not celebrated. He bowed his head and quickened his pace, following the path he had worn through the grass over the decades between the crater and his cave in the forest.

They followed him.

He went into the cave and stoked the fire, and kept his back to the entrance until night drove all the people home. He was hungry, and weak, and tired. And he did not understand these people, these strange people who cheered a completion of penance. He did not want to see them, he did not want to be confronted by them, so he sat in what he pretended was contemplation and ignored their calls and entreaties.

It was the dead of night, and amidst the chirping of crickets, when he finally stepped out. They had left gifts for him: flowers, bundles of food, rough-spun clothing, cut firewood, charms or simple twists of ribbon. He was used to their gifts; they had sustained him through his long silence. But there were more of them now, stacked in lines and piles, and he felt uncomfortable looking at the volume of it all. It was almost as though these simple folk worshipped him, and his silence, and his daily walk to the crater of red crystals. Strange people. Strange customs.

He left the gifts where they lay, and walked to the river.

His armour was heavy. He stripped himself of it, piece by piece, until he was bare under the light of the moon. He cast himself into the water, and sank like a stone to the bottom. Cold, so cold. He breathed out the bubbles in his lungs, watching them rise above him, and though it was cold around him he felt the burning within.

_Remember your vows_ , his mother scolded in memory. _If you take them, keep them._

He broke the surface. Perhaps he should have felt ashamed for gasping so greedily at the air. But his penance was over. He would not be a martyr if he sank into the river. Not now.

_We raised you_ ** _better_** _than this_.

The stranger stared bleakly around him, shivering in the river where he floated, treading water, his hair flattened wetly over his skull and his face. It was so dark, and his only companions were the sound of water, frogs, crickets, and distant night birds. Just noises, and cold. His penance was over and there was nothing else.

_No_. His father's soft voice seemed to whisper over the water. _Look closer. Listen harder_. 

The stranger let his feet touch the bottom of the river, and felt smooth pebbles. The water had rushed over the stones, wearing them smooth, carving a new path through the earth. Though it takes a hundred years, even stone can be changed. 

His penance was over. But his time here was not.

_Don't forget_.

He Sang softly, a croak of grief and a plea for forgiveness. 

The crickets harmonised.


	5. The Child

His back is burdened. A pack made from rough-spun garments and blankets, filled with food and waterskins and charms bound together with twists of coloured ribbon. Anything that the peasants who live on the edge of a battlefield can provide. Could gift.

Maybe they'll mourn that empty cave. And the man who never said a word.

The road is long, and winding, and he knows his feet will bleed before he reaches the end of it. But it feels good to have a purpose, even if that purpose is nothing more than 'see where the road leads you'. 

A woman screams in pain.

The stranger quickens his steps, until he sees the covered wagon over the rise. A girl frantically trying to boil water over a feeble fire. A man with worry and fear in his craggy face. A woman holding his hand and screaming over the curve of her belly.

All three turn to stare as the stranger practically falls over himself in his haste, throwing his pack down so he can kneel beside her. And he is a stranger, in his strange clothes and his strange features and those eyes that seem so far out of place.

But then the woman screams again, hair slicked over her scalp in sweat already. The ground between her legs is damp, and her whole body contracts and twitches in animalistic agony.

The stranger takes her hand, and breathes. Loudly. Puff puff puff. He squeezes her hand. Demanding her attention. Puff puff puff. Breathing. Slowly, through whimpers of pain, she starts to breathe along with him. He nods, encouragingly.

The girl by the fire garbles something at him. How can he possibly understand? But the fire is burning, and the water will soon bubble. Time enough? Who can say?

The stranger carefully places his hands on the woman's belly, and feels the way the child is seated inside her. Wrong. It's wrong. It will be a painful birth. A dangerous one. Neither woman nor child may survive.

The old man sees the look on the stranger's face, and hunches his shoulders in the way that rough men do when they are trying not to cry.

But the stranger sets his jaw. From his pack, he brings out bundles of herbs. He has learned of some of these strange plants in his years thus far. He feeds the woman some, for the pain, to give her something to chew on so she thinks about something more. With the rest, he makes a powder, a paste with some of the barely-boiled water. He coats his hands, and her skin. He is a stranger and they do not know him but the woman screams again and there is blood now. They do not stop him. They are too afraid, and he is calm. 

He is the mountain in the midst of their storm.

Softly, he Sings. In short puffs, to encourage the woman to breathe along, as he reaches inside her and turns the child around. Gently, gently, he Sings and soothes. He Sings as the water boils. He Sings as the old man grunts along, and the young girl tentatively hums. He Sings as the woman's screams get louder, and he Sings as he pulls himself free of her and feels her body spasm.

And he Sings until a fifth voice joins the chorus.

The girl swoops forward with water to wash the babe, and the old man draws a blade to cut the afterbirth that slithers out after it. The woman gasps and shudders, exhausted, plastered with sweat. And the babe wails.

The stranger sits back on his haunches, and gives them all a weak smile. They smile back, jubilant. The young girl washes his hands and chirps in a language he cannot hope to understand, so he just nods.

And he watches, as the family gathers around the babe, and he sits apart. A tiny hand grasps at the air before it curls into his mother's long hair, and he nurses contentedly.

A thought strikes the stranger. He pushes himself to his feet, and sifts through his pack again. There. Not all of the charms were made from carved wood or plaited straw. Some were stone, and more valuable than perhaps they realised.

Carnelian. For appetite, and energy, and for awakening inner strength. He winds together lengths of ribbon, and carefully wraps the stone around the child's belly.

The family look at him strangely, but with gratitude, as he smiles, bows, and shoulders his pack once more. The road's end is still before him.


	6. The Dream

Before him on the table are objects placed. Each one placed in perfect alignment. He looks them over, his body still weary and aching from the ritual of manhood. Stern-faced men and women observe him, waiting to see what he chooses.

His mother is tense. His father serenely anxious.

Whatever he chooses will decide his destiny. He has but a moment.

So he takes the circlet, and places it upon his brow. He takes the defender's shield. And he closes his hand around the healer's haft.

There is a ripple of surprise through the room.

And, unsurprisingly, his mother steps forward. "This is not a game. You are not outfitting yourself for a play or to impress these people. This is your life, boy. This is what your life will become."

"I have chosen." The weight of the shield feels good, and the hammer feels sturdy in his hand. Any doubts have dissipated under the weight of the circlet. He is at peace.

But his mother is furious. "Boy," she tells him, "It will tear you apart. You must not walk two paths. They will lead you in different directions."

The boy - the man - shakes his head. "My path will take me to the weak and the defenceless, to the shattered and broken. I shall mend. I shall defend. I shall restore."

"Boy..."

The father sets his hand on the arm of his wife. "He has chosen, Sevgimni."

"He has chosen _poorly_ ," she spits.

The elders rumble and speak, while the new man stands before them, burdened under his choice.

The rumble continues, louder and louder, and wakes him from his sleep. The stranger stirs, pushing himself from the earth's embrace, and listens. Under his palms, the earth groans like a woman in labour, twisting in pain as magic lances through her.

A war. Another war.

He leans back down against the earth, and tries to Sing to her, to calm her, but the earth wails and burns. He whispers, and places his palms upon the stone and soil. The pain is distant, and yet felt as sharp as a lance here, where he lies, because the veins of magic connect everything together. His Song is not enough.

The rumbling continues. And with it, a rising clatter, like the skittering feet of a great beetle.

He Sings, and realises almost too late there is a furious hissing surging up out of the dark.

He recoils, but not quite fast enough. From a single burning wound, his arm is aflame. His Song turns to a scream, a scream like the earth's own.

The stranger sees glowing eyes, and a gaping toothed maw, and can feel the heat of hatred on his skin. His skin, which burns as the venom courses through him.


	7. The Venom

He has never felt pain like this. It feels like the flesh is sloughing right off from his bones, like his blood is turning to fire. His cheek is against the stone floor, though he doesn’t remember falling. He doesn’t remember anything. The pain is absolute.

The creature retreats to the dark, but even over the sound of his own screams the stranger can hear it hissing. Through the pained delirium, it almost sounds like it is laughing at him.

There’s light refracting on the walls.

He’s not sure why that fascinates him. Perhaps that ancient story about light being a guide to the afterlife. He turns his head to look at the dancing lights, weeping as he is, but as he moves, so does the light.

Like firelight refracting through a crystal.

He rolls onto his back, and touches his shoulder. Instead of flesh - burning, moulting, rotting flesh - his fingers find only cold stone. His flesh is not dissolving. It is _crystallising_. 

The beast in the dark chitters and growls.

He Sings, haltingly, between sobs, stretching his good arm towards his pack. There are two stones in there, one a raw, imperial purple, and the other is a polished rod of mottled greens like moss or snakeskin. He needs them. He needs them.

They ease into his questing palm, one after the other. He holds them tightly, even as he feels the venom questing down to his fingertips, and up across his collarbone. More of him is freezing in that solid fire. Soon, he will be unable to move. Soon, he will be unable to breathe.

He grips the two stones, the purple and the green, and he Sings in desperation to them. Sobbing, aching, screaming in pain, he Sings.

There is more light refracting on the wall now. Specks of purple, tinged with a faint dark green.

The chittering beast is silent. The cavern echoes with the stranger’s desperate wordless Song. The earth’s pained wails are distant, but here, in this cave, they become still. Silent. Soothed.

And as the earth is soothed, so is he. The fire in his blood slowly dies, and sensation returns to his limb. He Sings until he is exhausted, and his grip on his healing stones loosens.

The creature comes out of the dark.

The stranger holds his breath, shaking in terror. Has it come to finish him off? Will that stinger plunge into his throat and end him in one fell swoop?

Careful claws pick up the healing stones, and there is fascination in that strange and alien face. One claw holds the purple stone, the other the green rod. In curiosity, it turns them over. Sniffs them. Licks them. The chittering is soft. Childlike.

The stranger wheezes.

And then the creature turns its attention to him. Claws prod and probe at the crystal casing the stranger’s arm, and it gives a surprised hiss as it shatters, as fragile as glass. The open wound weeps ichor and bright red blood, but the stranger’s flesh is otherwise unblemished.

The creature returns the healing stones, placing them with reverence on the stranger’s chest. Carefully, it plucks up one of the shards of shattered venom crystal, and eats it. It spits, giving a discontented noise, but it seems calmer, so much calmer now. Perhaps even kindly.

The stranger manages to weakly Sing for his own healing, a brief gasp to close the wound on his arm, before he falls into an exhausted sleep. The last thing he sees are the creature’s eyes, glowing in the dark, as it stands close by like some watchful sentinel.


	8. The Waking

There was a strange taste in his mouth. He swallowed, both eager and weak, without questioning what he had been given. Some ghost of his mother scolded and chideed him for his lack of caution, his gullibility, but his father’s voice was there to act as a balm to the woman’s rage. The water was clear, and tasted almost crystalline. It had filtered down through the earth, and been stored in some pool.

As he roused from exhaustion, he found he could name the crystals, just by taste. Quartz, mostly. Crystal, to cool him, soothe him, and blue for tranquillity and healing.

The stranger opened his eyes, and saw the beast holding a waterskin in its claws. His own waterskin. Refilled from somewhere deep in the cave? Had the beast been nannying the stranger, while he slept in delirium? 

When the beast saw the stranger’s eyes open, it lowered the skin, giving a rumbling noise. The stranger whispered his thanks and...

... he realised this is the first time he has spoken since he arrived on this strange and foreign world.

The beast gave some rumbling sound in return. From its maw came a rusty squawk, then a rumble, then strange grunts and squeaks. Was the beast... speaking to him?

The noises were as strange and indecipherable to the stranger as the voices of the peasants and soldiers who observed his penance. But he nodded, weary though he was, to show his gratitude, before he tried to push himself up. He sat, his head spinning, and he leant against his knees as he caught his breath. He was filthy, hungry, exhausted, ravaged by the lingering effects of the poison... but he lived.

The beast continued to click and chatter, gesturing with claws to the back of the cave. On clattering legs, it left, lingered, returned, chattered, and repeated, speaking in its strange and rusty language. The stranger found the strength to stand, and followed the beast, as it bid. Understanding, it seemed, can transcend worlds. 

Down into the dark. The stranger’s only guide was the rough-hewn stone wall on which he rested his hand, and the soft phosphorescence that was exuded by the creature’s rugged hide. Deeper and deeper, the stranger followed, over a path that seemed worn by ancient water flow, where no mortal had trod in centuries. If at all. Where was this beast taking him?

The caverns echoed with the sound of pain.

The stranger cringed as the sound ceased to be a whisper and became a scream. He knew that sound. Souls, strapped in stone, imprisoned and tortured to never know peace.

The beast gave a low chitter, and the stranger felt some sense of alarm when the cavern before him began to glow. Not just because the glowing stones that all contained a body, not just because all the poses of the trapped are twisted in agony, not just because the crystal encasing them are the same as what had consumed his own arm from the sting, but because the sound that the beast just made was _familiar_.

A Song. That creature Sang to the earth, and the earth responded.

The stranger was not _alone_.


	9. The Preparation

The revelation felt like it spanned more than moments. Days, perhaps. Months. Without the sun, the stranger had no way of knowing. It certainly felt to him like far too long. He had spent a hundred years in solitude, a stranger in a strange land, and now - suddenly and out of nowhere - there was this strange creature that had been able to Sing the same way he had.

Had the beast felt this way, as well? Is that why it had nursed him until he recovered?

His musings were disrupted by the cavern’s wailing, of the countless dead trapped in crystal. It broke the stranger’s heart to hear it, and he almost doubled over in pain. He let his voice rise in Song, trying to soothe the suffering masses into silence. The screaming and wailing was slowly muted, muffled, quieted. But it still lingered, just on the edges of his senses. The sound of pure agony.

The beast watched, its tail and claws swinging from side to side. Almost as though it were dancing along to the stranger’s song.

The stranger watched, almost transfixed. He could not believe what he was hearing. In the lingering echoes of dead men’s scream, he could hear the beast’s own pain as well. Loneliness. Centuries of loneliness. 

It puzzled him. He reached out a hand, and gently touched the beast’s rough hide. It snarled at him, in warning, in the habit of solitude, then bowed its head and accepted the touch. 

A shudder passed through the both of them. Understanding.

In that moment, the stranger knew what was being asked of him. What was required.

He gave the beast a gentle pat, then knelt and removed his pack. If he was to do this, then he would need his strength. The venom had left him weak and weary. He would need more than crystalline water to sustain him. 

His rations were low. He judged that he could stay here for more than a week. A dangerous mission, but one that needed to be undertaken.

The beast watched the stranger, watched him eat and drink. It crept off into the dark, and returned with a crystal clasped in both claws. Spindled legs folded as it sat down with him, and crunched the rock crystals between its jagged teeth.

The stranger winced at the sounds, but smiled. A picnic deep underground with a beast that had tried to kill him, while a war raged somewhere overhead. This world surely was a place of wonder.

And a world in dire need of a healer.


	10. The Rest

When he finally stops Singing, he is exhausted. His belly clings to his ribs. His clothes are saturated with his sweat. He feels so weak, so broken. But all around him is nothing but silence. The crystals remain, but all the souls are released. They know peace. They know rest.

The stranger groans, and sinks forward into the sand. He needs rest, too. Perhaps he would join the countless dead who had been imprisoned down here. Perhaps that will be enough for all his aches and pains.

A bowl of water is pushed towards him, and the stranger drinks like a dog. He has never tasted water so sweet. He drinks until the bowl is dry; the creature rubs its claws over the stranger’s back, clicking and cooing. The stranger manages a grateful smile. This strange beast has nannied him this entire time. Curious, that this beast should be his first friend in this foreign world. Even more curious is that he should find another who Sings.

Magic is common enough in this world. He feels it pulsing around him, coursing like water. He felt it in the heat of battle, in the moment where he was placed to stand in the midst of fighting men. Yet the people who watched him, the people he has passed, the people he has encountered thus far... none of them had magic.

The creature’s clicking draws his thoughts back to the present. Preserved meat is being presented to him, taken from the stranger’s own pack. The stranger smiles, and takes the morsel. It is likely the last of his supplies. Enough to bring him strength, but that is all. He will need to return to the surface. He will need to leave. 

The war is almost over. Fifty years of conflict is enough for any culture, even in this savage world; soon, there will be peace. He can feel it.

The leylines are as exhausted as he is. 

The creature croons, knowing the stranger’s intentions. It Sings of sadness, and loneliness. It wishes to follow, and yet does not wish to leave. It is scared of the war, and the empty spaces of the world, and of what the people in it might do to a beast like him.

The stranger starts to Sing, a gentle lullaby. A Song that promises sweet dreams and peaceful slumber, safety deep down in the embrace of the earth. The creature Sings along, as its body slumps. Its strange and rasping voice Sings of blessing, of best wishes, of gratitude. The stranger lays his hand on the creature’s rough-hewn head, and together they sing until his is the only voice that rings. The creature rests.

It will rest for decades, centuries, as long as it is not disturbed; when it wakes, it will have much to eat in those broken crystals, and to drink in that underground lake. Its dreams will be pleasant, and it will not be alone in them. It is the least that the stranger can do for his strange companion. Perhaps, one day, they will meet again.

Bolstered by the creature’s Song, the stranger finds he has the strength to stand. He shoulders his pack, and moves in the dark to collect his hammer, his shield, his circlet. In surprise, he finds the creature has left him a gift. All three of his sacred pieces have been seeded with crystal, and there are sproutings of it on his armour, too. A specific stone, too, one for a calm mind, a stone that bolsters the ability of its bearer to reach out and help others. A stone of magic, and of tranquility. The stone from which the stranger takes his name.

He takes a deep breath, greatly touched, and silently swears he will see these crystal seeds to fruition. This creature has given him a gift beyond repayment.

The leylines are exhausted and aching, but in this world, they hum and pulse. He follows them to the surface, returning to the world which so sorely needs a healer.


End file.
